Doctors and diversity: Using interfaith literacy and interfaith dialogue to improve patient care

In an increasingly diversifying world, how can doctors and other healthcare professionals improve patient care? Currently, many doctors do not understand how to approach religious differences or recognize their effect on patient health. Doctors must acquire interfaith literacy in medical school through required courses and learn the skills necessary to engage in interfaith dialogue with patients in their practice in order to provide the best patient care in areas with growing diverse patient populations.     

The interfaith network (UK) and interfaith relations

The InterFaith Network (UK) was formed officially in 1988 as the result of almost two years of negotiations, conversations and preparatory meetings. In the late 1980s there was a feeling in circles working in interfaith affairs that the time might have come for some form of national effort.     

Armenian Christians and Turkish Muslims: Prospects for reconciliation through interfaith dialogue on the events of history

In 1915, entire Armenian villages were burnt to the ground, residents being evacuated, murdered, or sent on forced death-marches. Armenian sources claim that as many as two million Armenians were murdered. These questions live on in present-day Muslim and Christian interaction. What should our response be to this relationship between past and present? This article explore how these unresolved histories affect present-day Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians in their faith and identity development. It considers the prospect of improved Turkish–Armenian relations as they relate to history and the role that religion might play in fostering reconciliation. Lastly, it suggests how these events might be instructive to Muslims, Christians, and Jews committed to interfaith partnerships for human rights.     

Identity,practice and dialogue

Identities are constructed and contested. This means they may be re‐worked to support more inclusive visions of who belongs and on what basis. However, identity construction does not take place in a vacuum, and social psychological analyses of change need to address the contextual dynamics that shape the processes and outcomes of dialogue. This requires attention to processes of power. Furthermore, we need to consider minority group members' understandings of these processes. From the perspective of the disadvantaged, dialogue may be experienced as disempowering because it is viewed as compromising group members' capacities to organize themselves to pursue strategies of social change. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The use of structural equation models in Consumer Psychology: A methodological dialogue on its contributions,cautions, and concerns

The goal of Consumer Psychology is to use manipulations and measures in order to make inferences as to the psychological processes that underlie consumer behavior. A statistical tool available to do so is Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Recent issues of this journal have provided primers in the use of SEM. Herein, three noted experts provide further guidance and philosophical consideration of the issues associated with SEM, as well as statistical and methodological concerns in general. The goal of this dialogue is to provide a foundation for the use of SEM in Consumer Psychology and the Social Sciences in general.     

Disruption,dialogue, and swerve: Reflective structured dialogue in religious studies classrooms

This article focuses on Reflective Structured Dialogue as a set of practices developed in the context of conflict resolution that are well suited to handling quotidian uneasiness and extraordinary moments of disruption in religious studies classrooms. After introducing Reflective Structured Dialogue's history, goals, and general practices, the authors consider its uses in classroom settings. They argue that a classroom in which teachers understand themselves as facilitators, and in which students are experienced in structured dialogue practices – including being comfortable in a state of intellectual “wobble” – is one more apt to be able to engage with, and more likely to benefit from, disruptive events.     

Preferences for religious help-seeking: racial and gender differences,interfaith intolerance,and defensive theology

We examined the relation between preference for religious help-seeking and defensive theology, interfaith intolerance, spiritual conceptualisations of mental health problems, race/ethnicity, and gender in a predominantly Christian sample of 389 college students. MANOVA revealed significant main effects for race/ethnicity, with African American participants showing higher scores than Caucasians and Latinos/as across all main study variables. Follow-up ANOVA yielded main effects for race across all four variables and main effects for gender on spiritual conceptualisation of mental health problems and defensive theology. All race/ethnicity by gender interactions were nonsignificant. Preference for religious help-seeking was regressed in a hierarchical manner on race/ethnicity and gender, followed by interfaith intolerance, defensive theology, and spiritual conceptualisation of mental health problems. A statistically significant model explaining 46% of the variance emerged incorporating all variables except race. A framework for understanding help-seeking preference is presented, followed by directions for future research.     

No creation, no revelation

There is a strong claim that the world’s createdness, if true, cannot be known but through revelation. In this paper we try to dismiss this claim by arguing that creation cannot be merely a revealed truth (revelabile tantum), since it is on the contrary the very preamble to any genuine revelation. Ontologically, no revelation can happen in a self-existent world. No creation, no revelation. Epistemically, no revelation is to be admitted but on the assumption that the world depends, for its existence and operation, on a supernatural agent. No admittance of creative power, no justified identification of any revelatory activity.     

Religious education of children in interfaith marriages

ABSTRACT

Various religious groups impose strict restrictions on their members marrying someone outside their faith, especially when it comes to Muslims marrying members of other religions. However, travelling in pursuit of higher education and employment has made it possible for people marry to outside their religious affiliation regardless of religious dogma and teachings. Since the 1970s, Turks have been migrating to the UK for various reasons such as job opportunities, and political conflicts happening in their homeland. The increasing number of marriages outside of the Turkish Muslim group has made it necessary to focus on the religious and ethnic identity formation of children in interfaith marriages of couples who are Turkish Muslims and non-Muslims and have at least one child between the ages of five and twenty. This case study examines responses of 32 couples and 15 children collected through questionnaire forms and interviews. The findings demonstrate that gender, religious and ethnic identity, level of religiosity, and the dominant culture have influenced parents’ identity and that of their children. While the parents try to minimise their differences by focusing on moral values, most children develop double consciousness, which can lead to hyphenated identity or syncretism.     

Impassibility and revelation

What is the relation between divine unchangeability and the reality of change as implied in ideas of creation and redemption? Western Trinitarian theology in the 20^th century tended toward emphasizing the significance of change above divine unchangeability, giving it a modalist and Hegelian flavour that questioned the continuity with the church fathers. For this reason, it has been criticized by Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lossky and David Bentley Hart. Newer scholarship has shown the significance of Luther's appropriation of the doctrine of divine unknowability and his insistence on the difference between revelation and divine essence for his understanding of the Trinity, which thus may appear to be much closer to the position of the Orthodox critics than to the Lutheran theologians criticized by them. There thus seems to be an unused potential in Luther's doctrine of the Trinity that should be of interest both for systematic and ecumenical theology.